


sometimes i still feel the bruise

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Break Up, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 17:37:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1122576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clara calls. She always thinks of you this time of night, when the whole world is wrapped in silence. “You’re the only one in this whole world who knows how to be still, Harry,” she says, and you don’t tell her: <i>I am not the good china. You cannot remember I exist on red letter days,</i> like you practiced.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sometimes i still feel the bruise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [radialarch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/gifts).



> A gift for Radialarch for Winterlock. Title taken from the Trembling Blue Stars song, which breaks my heart in the loveliest of ways.

Clara calls.

She always thinks of you this time of night, when the whole world is wrapped in silence. “You’re the only one in this whole world who knows how to be still, Harry,” she says, and you don’t tell her: _I am not the good china. You cannot remember I exist on red letter days_ , like you practiced.

Instead, you unpack the person you were when you were together, pull that version of Harry out of boxes and let the newspaper padding fall to the floor. You don’t even _go_ by Harry anymore –

“I miss you, too,” you say, because you’re an idiot. Fifteen years ago she kissed you, and as she was leaning in you were already ready to protest, because she was a girl and you were a girl, but then she’d taken you by surprise, and suddenly, _huh_ , that was a thing that worked. _That_ was lovely.

You’d come home with your head in your shoes and your stomach behind your knees in the best of ways and John, solid John, he hadn’t even asked, just poured you a drink and your first sip of wine was like falling in love all over again.

Now, your phone rings sometimes, late and later and tonight it is practically morning. Fifteen years later and she can still twist you in her hands like thread. “You were my best friend before you were my lover,” she purrs, and just like that you’ve caught fire: her molten purr over _lover_ pulls you underwater, back to the slip of shaved leg against shaved legs, the way her thighs used to pin you in the loveliest of ways.

You’ve lost both, with her being the most notable example of both. You stepped away from Clara because the first step to healing is admitting you’ve got a problem, but a lot of the steps in the middle are about cutting out those unhealthy habits, neural pathways, people who make it easy to be the worst version of yourself. Clara never needed you to change, but somebody did. You did.

 _But_. You made the mistake of telling Clara once that you can’t distinguish the elements of music from each other, because you hear melodies as a homogenous blend of likable or unlikable sound.

Afterwards, you never heard a piece she liked without her explaining all of the parts, or clicking out the drum line with her teeth and tongue or her flicking back to the start of the track because there’s no way she was going to let you miss that bass. You’re certainly doing _okay_ without her, because you’re made out of spiderweb and covalent bonds and other underestimated forces, but that doesn’t mean you don’t hear an echo of her when you can’t untangle the violin from the cello part.

“Why are you calling?”

Clara has a list: because of the way you hiccup loudly enough to disrupt people two rooms over but she’s never in hearing distance of that sound anymore, and how the cat doesn’t seem to get that you’re gone, and the way she’d learned to keep time by the schedules you keep and now she doesn’t ever know what day it is.

Finally, she gets to the last item: “Because it’s Christmas, Harry, and I know a lot of people, and I’m an adult – I’ve got object permanence, but I see all these people, every day, and they might as well not exist when I’m not looking at them.”

Your fingernails clack against the table to let her know you haven’t got all day.

“Don’t say it, Harry, I can hear you saying it: _your underdeveloped frontal lobe is not my responsibility,_ ” she says, and your heart pounds in your tongue, against your teeth; there isn’t enough air in the room. Your leg has fallen asleep, the tight lines of your trousers like a tourniquet at the knee. “What I’m trying to say is, I spend all day with ghosts but you always exist, and it always hurts.”

An Alaskan Salmon can leap up waterfalls; you can put the phone down.

“I never stop hurting, either,” you tell her, and you have to gather the words like nettles, like kindling, collecting the prickly bits with tattered fingers. You’ve done this before. Gasoline, matches, all the kindling goes up in smoke: you’ve been too drunk to hit the moving target of the floor, but you’ve never felt so lost, so hollow, and there is no saliva left.

Christmas is not the time to pick up the things you’ve lost, picking out miracles of ordinary, ugly human loneliness.

Everyone misses their ghosts at the witching hour. You’ll love her until the sea swallows the whole continent, until the snow thaws and the party is over, you will love her when you’ve got wrinkles and one day your memory will start to fail and you’ll call John’s grandchildren by her name until they turn red.

If you’re still haunting her in _January, February, March_ , then. Then maybe, maybe you can start swimming downstream again.  


End file.
